IMMI FINDINGS
Trailers and TV Work Together to Line Them Up for "300"
Look at recent research panel data for the surprise hit: "300" Warner Brothers ran a big TV campaign ahead of opening weekend. Any IMMI panel member who saw ads for “300” saw the ads an average of seven times, achieving a conversion of almost 8%. Trailers for the movie (seen in theaters) were seen an average of 1.31 times... but conversion for trailers for that first weekend was 22.5%. That means more than a fifth of the people who saw the trailer also saw the movie. This is a high conversion rate, and it indicates that for "300", a big audience for the trailers turned into a big audience for the movie.
Even though the trailer audience is a bulls eye for movie promotion, by itself it’s effect is not big enough for a turnout like the audience for "300". Conversion is much higher for trailers, but the total audience is much bigger for television, and even with lower conversion numbers television reached twice the audience that got in line for opening weekend.
When we breakdown the opening weekend panelist numbers and compute the actual percentage of the panelist audience delivered by each type of promo and a combination, we see that “lines beget lines” but TV certainly adds to the phenomenon.
Trailers are more efficient at targeting the audience, but trailers and TV combined appeared to deliver the big numbers for "300".